General Question

Why can't my husband fold laundry while watching television?

I’m mystified as to why my husband can’t watch golf, tennis, whatever on televsion and fold laundry, or do a repetitive task, at the same time. Is this a gender thing? (I’m not talking about watching a favorite team on tv—he watches anything that’s on.)

21 Answers

Probably for the same reasons we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, we’re hopelessly uncoordinated. On second thought, I’d better not speak for all guys because I’ll probably end up in someone’s crosshairs.

Speaking for myself, I’m only functional about half the time because I’m a little to left of center and easily distracted by nothing important.

humans work the same way as comupters do.
computer processors do something called “timesharing” meaning the processor rapidly switches from one task to another, but never really doing two or more tasks at the “same time”. when you play your music while typing a document, really the processor just jumps back and forth from those two tasks. this assumes that the computer has a single-core processor, hence only one brain. dual core processors really have 2 brains, hence real multi-tasking. but humans only have one brain, so there’s the comparison.

it’s the same with humans. you can’t fold clothes when your eyes are concentrated on the television. i guess it applies to many people not just males.

I don’t think the timesharing concept is correct – especially for females. We can curl or straighten our hair while our eyes are on the tv; we can fold clothes while looking at the tv; all sorts of things like that.

I understand the original poster’s frustration – she most likely had a lot of housework, and chose something her husband could help her with that wouldn’t inconvenience him or make him grumpy. She put a pile of clothes next to him on the couch and asked him to help her by folding them while she was cleaning elsewhere.

For me – I see nothing wrong with that. Because I know how to fold different items, it takes almost no effort. I don’t have to look at the item of clothing.

So here is my answer:

There are certain skills that we know from doing them so often. It’s most likely that folding is not a skill of your husband’s – he’d spend more than half the time looking at the clothing than the television. On the other hand, if he does do a lot of folding, then he was just being lazy and selfish.

I think that “TV time” for this guy is actually “zone out time”. Maybe his brain is tired from being intelligent all the time. All that multi-tasking over the course of a week sucks. Even an hour to veg out can do wonders, from personal experience.

hahahah fireside. i was thinking the same thing…“if only someone would make one of those for me”.

As for the title Q, I CAN fold laundry while watching TV, but I don’t want to (and I am a girl). It ruins the TV experience for me…I like to just lie in a relaxed mode while watching my shows. Not trying to do 20 things at once (like my mother dear). I don’t know about your husband, but TV is really one of the few times I actually relax, at almost all other times, I am multi-tasking so I don’t want to ruin my one last thing either.

Well, I don’t seem to have that problem. My husband does all the laundry because I’m chemically sensitive and when I step near laundromats I get really sick for hours. He couldn’t stand watching me struggle and then collapse on the bed afterwards so he said,

“I’m doing the laundry from now on because I can’t stand it when you’re so sick and I can’t hang out with you.”

I remember seeing Martha Stewart showing off that three point method of folding shirts on one of her first shows after prison. I kept thinking about how she must have picked that trick up in the prison laundry.